THE ENIGMA OF JAPANESE POWER
People and Politics in a Stateless Nation
Karel van Wolferen
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989
496 pp., $24.95
Japan has struggled with the modern world all through the bloody night of the last century, and like Jacob with the angel it clutches its antagonist in a ferocious grip. "I will not let you go unless you bless me," cried Jacob, and the Japanese also await with a sense of increasing urgency some blessing, some accolade, some recognition from the outer world--the alien and unbearably attractive West. But the rest of the world, lacking angelic insight, cannot bestow the recognition that the Japanese long for, and in consequence, their conduct in this struggle has been more often a matter of fools rushing in than of angelic reluctance to tread too heavily. And after all, what conceivable consummation will satisfy the yearning of the dogged warrior-businessmen for their proper place?
It is Karel van Wolferen's impressive achievement, after twenty-five years of life and work in Japan, to have formulated the question that the tragic and inspiring history of Japan over the last century proposes to us, and with impressive restraint, he refrains from easy answers.
The "enigma" of his title centers in this: In the ashes and humiliation of the shattering defeat of 1945 the Japanese hammered out a long-term strategy for survival, first out of necessity, thereafter with increasing sophistication and subtlety, elaborating it through the American occupation, the Cold War conflicts, and the birth of a global society of high consumption and high communication. This strategy was simply formulated: the survival and prosperity of the nation relied on economic growth at all costs and by all means. A century before, Japanese administrators summed up their goals in the slogan "Rich country, strong army." The army having proved an unreliable support, only the goal of national enrichment remained. Mao had seen power growing out of the barrel of a gun; it was the Japanese experiment to determine whether power might not grow out of one's balance at the bank.
This policy was perfectly rational, sensible, and self-explanatory. The riddle is not why the policy was chosen, but why, fifty years later, in a very different world, it is still adhered to so rigidly that no danger signals from outside or from within seem to alter it.
Van Wolferen's solution to this problem seems radical, but it is based on a solid foundation of experience and an impressive fund of scholarship. He postulates that the Japanese nation cannot change policies, because it has no equipment for, or experience in, debating alternatives, no political mechanism for making binding decisions that are recognized by all the people as legitimate, and no unambiguous locus of central political responsibility. This astonishing nation, which has risen from the depths of defeat to the pinnacles of economic and financial power, is indeed a nation without a state, a people without a citizenry, and an administration whose purely pragmatic decisions have no ultimate legitimacy.
The Shinkansen bullet train is speeding down the tracks below Mount Fuji, but no one is at
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